Featured Selections

The Human Age

Our typical response to books like this, which deal with the Anthopocene and the ultimate invasive species, is to nod and cluck our tongue in solidarity with yet another doomsday essay. Ackerman, however, despite sharing our assessment of the negative effects of homo sapiens on the planet, opts for optimism. She sees human innovation as a realistic hope for confronting the growing impacts that our species is having on our air, water and earth. “Our relationship with nature has changed…radically, irreversibly, but by no means all for the bad. Our new epoch is laced with invention. Our mistakes are legion," she says, “but our talent is immeasurable.” Chapter by chapter Ackerman takes us on a mission of discovery to explore this new reality in which we have "subdued 75 percent of the land surface, concocted a wizardry of industrial and medical marvels, strung lights all across the darkness." But, what about the downside? She dismisses it rather too quickly for our taste. “Laced with invention…our talent is immeasurable," indeed! Two and a half billion humans still lack access to a rudimentary latrine! In any event it’s worth reading.

Alibi for Two

by Augustine Merrill
Poetry
Parallel Press
Chapbook
$13.95

It’s always agonizing when someone – perhaps an author, perhaps his daughter- comes into the store and hands us a slim volume of poems and asks us to please add them to our inventory. Usually they are heartfelt, but mostly not very good. Even so, it’s hard to say “sorry, but no." Sometimes, though, initial skepticism is overcome by the reality of something very special. That is the case with Lee Merrill’s small collection from Parallel Press. Each of his poems is prefaced with a haunting prose piece describing a place, an occurrence or a feeling that has given rise to the poem itself. They touch upon relationship, discord, aging, loneliness, and quiet natural beauty. For our friend Bill Heart he writes of “thoughts so thick they are hoisted on poles." He tells us how his third self lumbers out on to the dock “past the second wife, the first child, the latest dog." This is beautiful work!

Under the Wide and Starry Sky

“Under the wide and starry sky, / Dig the grave and let me lie.” This book is Nancy Horan’s second novel about a famous creative genius and the woman who inspired him. In Loving Frank, which we (and our Book Group) liked very much, she gave us a fascinating glimpse into the passionate journey of Frank Lloyd Wright. This time, she captures the rich, complicated and deeply entwined lives of Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife, Fanny Osbourne. She probes how love and marriage can simultaneously offer inspiration and encumbrance. Under the Wide and Starry Sky is a richly imagined and compelling story of passionate love, laughter, pain and sacrifice. Because of Stevenson’s ill health and efforts to cope with it, the story takes us to settings far and wide. Beautifully written, this book blends carefully researched history with the novelist’s art. We loved this book!

Rules of Summer

Combining humor and surreal fantasy, Shaun Tan pictures a summer in the lives of two boys. Each spread tells of an event and the lesson learned. By turns, these events become darker and more sinister as the boys push their games further and further.

Then we start learning the rules. We won't post them all, but one of our favorites is "never wait for an apology." These are not rules just for summer, these are rules (and metaphors) for life and living it. A perfect book for kids from 8 to 80!

Swann's Way

"Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure." Okay. So we did it! After 70-odd-years of intellectual barrenness we have begun reading Proust! This first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past) is a revelation. Those who know Proust already appreciate the enormous power and grandeur of this work. Those (like us) who have resisted would do well to try it on. The descriptions are hypnotic as they cycle round and round in memory – a child’s bedtime, a bit of Madeleine cookie dunked into a cup of tea, the steeple of Combray. The quotidian is revisited and layered over until the sublime emerges from the mundane. It’s probably not for everybody and all seven volumes are probably for the vanishing few. But, it will be a pleasure to say, “Yes. Of course I’ve read Proust. And I liked it!”

The Keillor Reader

by Garrison Keillor
Humor
Viking Adult
Hardcover, 400 pages
$27.95

“Aunt Flo would sit down by my mother and she’d give us the dirt that the local paper couldn’t report. We enjoyed hearing these things. We were good Christian people and we believed in forgiveness but meanwhile we liked to know exactly what it was we were forgiving them for.” That’s a dose of vintage Garrison Keillor! This paragon of “Minnesota Nice” captivates us again with his folksy descriptions of people (maybe us!) facing the hardships and boredoms of everyday life in these parts. Some of it is just odd-ball stuff like the boy’s failed attempt to scatter his grandmother’s remains by putting them inside a hollowed-out bowling ball and then dropping them from a great height via para sail. But, it’s all funny – or, at least, amusing!

Annihilation

Speaking of steampunk, we have recently read and enjoyed Annihilation, the initial volume of Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy. Four scientists are seeking to discover the nature of a creeping dystopia which is spreading from the borders of the so-called “Area X." They are only the latest expedition to undertake this task. The earlier expeditions fell victim to a variety of horrors ranging from suicide and homicide to deprogramming and madness. The characters are a little thin, but that’s not really the point. The story holds its own.

Code Talker

Chester Nez died last week at age 93. He was the last of the Navajo “code talkers” who stumped the Japanese code breakers in the Pacific Theater during WWII. They created the only unbroken code in modern warfare. Chester Nez was not his real name. Ironically, that was a name given to him at “Indian School” at Fort Defiance where he was punished for using his native language. “All those years, telling you not to speak Navajo, and then to turn around and ask us for help with that same language,” he told USA Today in 2002, “It still kind of bothers me.” It’s a fascinating and compelling story. One of the best to come out of WWII.

The Orenda

by Joseph Boyden
Historical Fiction
Knopf
Hardcover, 448 pages
$26.95

This is Canadian author Joseph Boyden's third novel, and it is written with a sense of artful savage beauty. Boyden’s compassion for all his characters invites us to acknowledge the wholeness of the life force that Native Canadians call “the orenda”: a unity encompassing cruelty and kindness, ignorance and understanding, inevitable sorrow and joy the more precious for the knowledge of “where we all must journey” in the end.

This amazing journey is told through the eyes of three main characters: the Wendat warrior Bird; Snow Falls, the Iroquois girl he takes as his daughter after killing her family; and Christophe, one of the Jesuit priests derisively termed “crows” by the natives “for the way they hop around and peck at dead or dying things.” Epidemic, drought, crop blight, Western muskets and Catholic missions fatally interact to provoke the novel’s violent climax. This is not an easy or fast read, but you will hang on to every perfectly placed word as you travel on this emotional and tragic journey.

Natchez Burning

It has been five years since we have seen a new Greg Iles book. At 800 pages, this novel, with Penn Cage and his family as the central characters, provides an intense and gripping racial history of the American South from the early 1960’s to 2005. This book is the first of a trilogy and Iles spins a complicated tale leaving the reader breathless and hungry, wondering what will happen in the next book. An Oscar Wilde quote from the book sums things up really well; “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”

Everything I Need to Know I Learned From a Little Golden Book

by Diane Muldrow
Humor
Little Golden Books
Hardcover, 96 pages
$9.99

One of our all-time favorite childhood books was The Poky Little Puppy by Janette Lowrey. It is a story of enormous moral consequence involving misbehavior, prevarication and, finally, the loss of dessert. That is one of the real-life situations covered in the 70-plus-year-old (published, perhaps not coincidentally, in the year of our birth) Little Golden Books series. Muldrow, the series' long-time editor, takes the life lessons embedded in the stories and, in a nostalgic and uplifting way, brings them up-to-date as a self-help text. Hokey? Maybe. But the illustrations are worth the $9.99 and the walk down Memory Lane.

The Once and Future World: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be

Having just returned from a visit to Rapa Nui (Easter Island), our earlier reading of J.B. MacKinnon’s meditation on the state of the natural world has resolved to crystal clarity. Rapa Nui is a microcosm of MacKinnon’s worldview. Humans first arrived there in the first millennium AD. By 1722, when the first Europeans arrived, its lush, pristine ecosystem had already been devastated and its Polynesian civilization left in ruins. The Europeans, needless to say, continued and extended that process.

MacKinnon begins by asking us to, “Picture the first place you thought of as nature.” He then goes on to show how, by the “shifting baseline syndrome” or “change blindness,” that picture is illusory and the result of a long history of human transformation. By 1492, which we often take as the baseline, every corner of the Americas had been radically changed by its native populations. Each generation comes to assume that the “nature” it grows up with is the normal state. And so it goes like the proverbial frog in a pot of warming water.

MacKinnon claims that what is left is a “10% world” – that the variety of species, their number, and the range that they occupy are 10% of what they used to be. What’s more, the loss of each species results in a “double disappearance” – that is the loss that occurs to us by the extinction or extirpation of a critter with which we have interacted. His prescription is to “…remember, reconnect and rewild." This is a sobering book, but the elegance of its prose is a pleasure to read.

End of Night

Paul Bogard takes us on a progressively darkening tour of the night sky going from the brightest point on the planet – Las Vegas’ Luxor Beam – to one of the darkest – the Great Basin National Park also, interestingly, in Nevada. Bogard’s premise is that light pollution is more and more alienating us from the beauty and importance of the night sky. His metrics are horrifying! He projects that 80% of children born in the US today will never know a night dark enough to see the Milky Way and that for 75% of us our eyes never switch to night vision.

Bogard has roots in the north having been born in Minneapolis and spending time in northern Wisconsin where his love for the night sky grew and set. He even had a stint at Northland College. There, in the Apostle Islands and some places along the south shore of Lake Superior, the Milky Way blazes across the sky, the northern lights shimmer, and the moon casts its own light and shadows. The range of Bogard’s exploration is worldwide and his prose is a deep pleasure. Witness:

“These are maybe the most exciting stars, those just above where sky meets land and ocean, because we so seldom see them, blocked as they usually are by atmosphere…and, as I grow more and more accustomed to the dark, I realize that what I thought were still clouds straight overhead aren’t clearing and aren’t going to clear, because these are clouds of stars, the Milky Way come to join me.
There’s the primal recognition, my soul saying, yes, I remember.”

Ellie's Log: Exploring the Forest Where the Great Tree Fell

This book was a finalist for the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Children's Award.

We really liked Ellie’s Log for how it artfully combines adventure, storytelling and scientific inquiry. The story is related as fiction but is clearly designed to convey factual information about the forest ecosystem. After a huge tree falls in the forest behind her home during a winter storm, eleven-year-old Ellie and her new friend, Ricky, explore the forest where Ellie lives. Together, they learn how trees provide habitat for plants and animals high in the forest canopy, down among mossy old logs, and deep in the pools of a stream. The plants, insects, birds, and mammals they discover come to life in colored pen-and-ink drawings. Ellie’s father is the U.S. Forest Service forest manager, and her mother is a naturalist so they help Ellie and Ricky identify and explain what they see. However, the two children also demonstrate how to consult appropriate references and explore on their own.

The narrative alone could be a bit a bit dry for young readers, but it is artfully supplemented with excerpts from Ellie’s own field notebook. Ellie’s drawings and notes are distinctly colorful and childlike, and they create an inspiring model for any young person wanting to explore and record their observations in nature.

Ellie’s Log also features book recommendations and online resources for readers and teachers—including a Teacher’s Guide—which are available at the companion website.

One caution is that Ellie’s Log is set in the Pacific Northwest, so, while the book generally models good nature journaling, children living in environments very different than the one detailed in the book, might not find it as helpful.

This Is A Moose

When a movie director tries to capture the life of a moose on film, he’s in for a big surprise. It turns out the moose has a dream bigger than just being a moose–he wants to be an astronaut and go to the moon. His forest friends step in to help him, and action ensues. Lots of action. Like a lacrosse-playing grandma, a gigantic slingshot into space, and a flying, superhero chipmunk.

In this hilarious romp, Richard T. Morris and bestselling illustrator Tom Lichtenheld remind us to dream big and, when we do, to aim for the moon.

Serpent of Venice

What do you get when you stitch Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and “The Cask of Amontillado” together? Well, you get this absurd adventure in which Pocket, the royal fool introduced in Moore’s Fool (2009), is lured to Venice, where he thinks he’ll be having a fun time with the beautiful Portia, but where three men (including a man named Iago) are actually planning to murder him. To some, the idea of combining two Shakespeare plays and an Edgar Allan Poe short story might be vaguely chilling, but in Moore's usual ways, he creates genius!

If you’re the kind of reader who insists Shakespeare is untouchable, then this novel will probably annoy you on principle. On the other hand, if you’re a fan of Moore’s brand of history-mangling humor, you’ll dive right in with a big grin on your face. We think the grins win in the end.

One Summer: America 1927

by Bill Bryson
History
Anchor Press
Paperback, 544 pages
$16.95

It was the summer that Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs, much of the country was engulfed by a catastrophic flood, Jack Dempsey lost the famous “long count” fight to Gene Tunney, the world’s leading bankers made the policy adjustment that would do so much to bring down Wall Street in 1929, “The Jazz Singer” was released, an American audience got its first public demonstration of television, work started on Mount Rushmore, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed, and Henry Ford stopped making Model T’s. And oh, yes, most of the world went mad over a 25-year-old prodigy named Charles Lindbergh, who flew a flimsy plane to Paris from New York.

All this and much, much more transpired in that epic summer of 1927, and Bill Bryson captures its personalities, exciting events, and occasional just plain weirdness with his trademark vividness, eye for detail, and delicious humor. In that year America stepped out onto the world stage as the main event, and One Summer transforms it all into narrative nonfiction of the highest order.

Flash Boys

Imagine if you had electronic gear on which a share of stock could experience about 500 quote changes and about 150 trades in a millisecond – that’s one 1000th of a second! A really quick blink of an eye takes a leisurely 100 milliseconds. Well, you could probably make a little money! Wall Street’s so-called “high-frequency traders” did just that – in the billions of dollars a year at a fraction of a penny at a time. As with most of the rest of Wall Street these days they did it not to channel capital to productive enterprise, but rather to line their pockets and burnish the machismo of their arrested development. Michael Lewis’ fascinating story of how a group of “rogue” Wall Street good guys out-gamed the gamers is as exciting as the best whodunit. They uncovered the predatory strategies – especially electronic front-running, rebate arbitrage, and slow-market arbitrage – and blocked each one. Oddly enough, they did it by slowing things down! Not being entirely selfless do-gooders, they have created their own transparent exchange – IEX – and have already left exchanges like AMEX in the dust. Great story, great characters!

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

Open the doors at bookseller AJ Fikry’s Island Books (where “No Man Is an Island; Every Book Is a World.") and find tragedy, comedy, romance, mystery, and more. Open this book and find an affectionate portrait of a curmudgeonly bookseller who faces loss through literature, with surprising results. While it may be simply written, and unlikely to dramatically change lives, we fell in love with these characters and their stories.

This book seems to have been written for those who truly love bookstores - those who spend time haunting the aisles of small independent bookstores wherever they can be found. Each chapter is named after a story that Fikry himself quickly reviews or summarizes. And so we get snippets from Roald Dahl, Raymond Carver, Flannery O’Connor and J.D. Salinger. More than tributes, these brief passages provide Fikry an opportunity to philosophize on how his worldview is similar to or different from the story in question, and they frame each portion of the book very well.

We might also note that we may have loved this book simply because it is a small bookstore in a small town, with characters to whom can easily relate. Zevin has identified the day-to-day operations of a bookstore beautifully - even if it is describing the oh-so-exciting task of breaking down boxes after a delivery!

The Sixth Extinction

So, we guess it’s quite natural. Any species that gets a dominant leg up in an ecological niche (like algae in a pond) seems to reproduce exponentially, eat itself out of house and home, foul its nest and, ultimately, die off along with everything around it. Sound like anybody we know? Sounds like somebody Elizabeth Kolbert knows! She finds us in the midst of a great extinction - the sixth to occur in the past 500,000 years. The earlier five were the products of inanimate objects or geophysical forces – asteroids, volcanos, etc. This time according to Kolbert, it’s us!

She notes that, "One-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all fresh-water molluscs, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion." And that’s just for starters. And virtually all these extinctions can be traced to human activity and impacts. All this within the blink of an eye in terms of geologic time.

The content is rigorously researched. The writing is crisp and accessible. The tone is deeply affectionate, but deeply troubled. This is an important book. One thing though. Its subtitle is An Unnatural History. Hmmmmmm…? We wonder about that – the really scary thing is that it seems like it might be quite natural after all.

Cover Her Face

by P.D. James
Mystery
Scribner
Paperback, 256 pages
$15.00

Some time ago in these notes we featured P.D. James’ then newish book Death Comes to Pemberley, her imagined sequel to Pride and Prejudice. As is well known, when we speak of P.D. James we are actually talking about Phyllis Dorothy James, Baroness James of Holland Park, OBE, FRSA, FRSL, the 93-year-old Dean of British crime novelists. What we didn’t note at the time is that at the core of her body of work are her fourteen mysteries featuring Adam Dalgliesh the investigator and poet of New Scotland Yard. Cover Her Face, published in 1962, was the first of these. The victim is an unwed teenaged mother confined to a refuge for delinquent girls. She has been on loan to Mrs. Eleanor Maxie at Martingale, a medieval manor house in Essex. Not your average parlour maid, Sally Jupp, announces her betrothal to the family’s eldest son to the horror of an assembled cast of characters. The following morning she is found strangled in her bed. Whodunit? All are suspects with the motive, opportunity and means. A quaint and charming read!

The Sugar Season

Last year we snow-shoed into Rick & Janet Dale’s Highland Valley sugar bush. With us was, Donatus, out stalwart guide from Tanzania. He was as game in the snowy northwoods as we were on his turf in the Ngorogoro Crater.

Here, Douglas Whynott asks us to picture a team of horses pulling a wooden wagon on skids through the snowy woods hauling buckets of maple sap to the sugar shack to be boiled into syrup. Empty replacement bags hang from the spigots tapped into the trees that make up the sugar bush. This late winter/early spring ritual is a part of the agricultural lore in our neck of the woods as well as that of Vermont and New Hampshire. It is New England that Whynott covers in this exploration of the maple syrup process.

In The Sugar Season, Whynott, who teaches writing at Emerson College and lives in Langdon, NH, offers us a wide-ranging look inside the maple syrup business, from the ground level of small and large New England producers right on up the supply chain to buyers and distributors who package the product for supermarket shelves around the world. Whynott’s engaging book offers a skillful and fascinating peek behind the curtain of one of the region’s oldest and most beloved traditional industries.

Up at Butternut Lake

It’s been ten years since Allie Beckett crossed the threshold of her family cabin at Butternut Lake, Minnesota. Now, newly widowed after the death of her husband in Afghanistan, she’s returned with her five-year-old son. There, she reconnects with the friends she had in childhood-best girlfriend Jax, now married with three kids and one on the way, and Caroline, owner of the local coffee shop. What Allie doesn’t count on is a newcomer to Butternut Lake, Walker Ford.

Up at Butternut Lake follows these four unforgettable characters across a single summer as they struggle with love, loss, and what it means to take risks, confront fears, and embrace life, in all of its excitement and unpredictability. Allie Beckett could never have imagined when she ran away from her old life that she was running into a whole new life, up at the lake...

Can't and Won't

Speaking of P.D. James, we note that she has quoted E. M. Forster’s famous dictum that,” ‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story.” The short stories of Lydia Davis push that point to the hilt. Her new volume Can’t and Won’t takes its title from one of the stories. We quote it in its entirety:

I was recently denied a writing prize because, they said, I was lazy. What they meant by lazy was that I used too many contractions: for instance, I would not write out in full the words cannot and will not, but instead contracted them to can't and won't.

Huh? Others are shorter yet. For example, this one entitled Certain Knowledge from Herodotus comes from her earlier volume The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis:

These are the facts about the fish in the Nile:

Hmmmmm? So, what is it about her work that has warranted both the 2013 Man Booker International Prize and a MacArthur grant? That she married Paul Auster? That she divorced Paul Auster? Maybe it’s that as Dana Goodyear writes in a recent New Yorker, “…that taken together, her work – cerebral, witty, well-built, homey, homely, sometimes vanishingly small – had heft." Or maybe as Jonathan Franzen has said, “She is the shorter Proust among us.”